"Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945" by Frederick Taylor
So the Allies ruthlessly -- and unjustifiably -- firebombed Germany's most beautiful city and murdered hundreds of thousands of people, right? Not quite, says a prominent British historian.
"Most Americans -- at least, the ones who aren't addicted to the History Channel -- know about the bombing of Dresden in 1945 from Kurt Vonnegut's bestselling novel "Slaughterhouse-Five," based on Vonnegut's own experiences as a prisoner of war. The attack is still a touchstone for the moral perils of war. Frederick Taylor, a British historian whose new book on the subject goes on to challenge much of what we think we know about the bombing, describes the conventional understanding thus: "Dresden was the unforgivable thing our fathers did in the name of freedom and humanity, taking to the air to destroy a beautiful and, above all, innocent European city. This was the great blot on the Allies' war record, the one that could not be explained away."
Slaughterhouse-Five" came out in 1969, a time when many Americans were wondering just how much carnage could be justified by the trumpeted ideals of democracy and freedom. Like Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," "Slaughterhouse-Five" is a book set during World War II that was read in the light of Vietnam. It wasn't the first time Dresden was seen as a proxy. Taylor writes that not long after the war's end, and certainly before that, "Dresden became one of the most well-placed pawns on [a] virtual propaganda chessboard." There is the real Dresden and the Dresden of legend. Taylor makes what is by all appearances a good-faith effort to excavate the former by digging through the many layers of the latter. His "Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945" aims to be the last word on the subject, though it's sure to be argued about for years to come.
The most familiar version of the story, the one that appears in "Slaughterhouse Five," is that Dresden, the seventh largest city in Nazi Germany, was a lovely, cultured place of no military significance that had been left untouched by the air war before February 1945. The Allies' attack, two waves of Royal Air Force bombings on the night of Feb. 13 and a lesser raid by American planes the following day, was an unprecedented, unnecessary, vindictive assault made at a point when the war was essentially over and when the Allies knew that the city was full of refugees fleeing the advancing Russian front to the east. The attack, according to this version, was a pure "terror bombing" designed to wreak maximum havoc and culminating in the aerial strafing of people fleeing the flames. Somewhere between 135,000 and a half-million people were killed.
According to Taylor, most of the above is simply untrue. Tapping municipal records that have only recently become accessible after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany (the nation that included postwar Dresden), he persuasively argues that the real death toll from the attack was somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 and that Dresden was far from innocent of war-related industry and activity. After scrutinizing and comparing the records and history of British bombing campaigns against the Third Reich in the latter days of the war, he finds that "Dresden was a big raid, but no bigger than a considerable number of others at that time directed against the urban areas of Germany." He comes up with several stated and plausible reasons for the Allies to target the city besides the main motive attributed to them by their harshest critics: bloodthirsty revenge for the bombing of London during the Blitz and anti-German zeal. The strafing almost certainly never occurred.
